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Aviation History
1957
1957 - 0090.PDF
90 FLIGHT, 18 January 1957 AERONAUTICS AND THE ENGINEER .... , Left, Mr. J. Wright and Sir George Dowty at the reception. Right, Mr. C. F. Uwins, Mrs. Uwins and Mr. R. E. Leete. ranges have been erected in Britain since the war, and we shall soon haverunning more transonic and supersonic tunnels than we had subsonic tunnels before the war. This augurs well for the future since, for eachnew design of supersonic aircraft, at least ten different models are needed for some test or another in three different kinds of wind-tunnel—sub-sonic, transonic and supersonic. It can now be said with some truth that our aeronautical establish-ments and the aeronautical industry have never before been so well equipped to tackle the aerodynamic, structural and propulsion problemsof today and to develop the aircraft the users want . . . The military fighter aircraft has already penetrated well into the super-sonic speed regime and this experience has shown that the classical ground facilities for aerodynamic, structural and propulsion research,which for years have been the aeronautical engineers' stock-in-trade, will need augmenting in many different directions as the flight speedincreases further. Kinetic heating problems, for example, will give rise to much research in heat transfer, control of the boundary layer andin the evolution of wing and cabin structures which can readily be cooled. There are, too, those more direct effects of speed, such as thetime available to the crew to execute an action, and these will demand automatic integration of radar, electronic and instrument facilities andinformation to relieve the pilot and free him to do what man alone can do—think and command. Moreover, the fighter aircraft is not the only vehicle of flight whichnow has a supersonic speed capability. There is the ground-to-air guided weapon, the air-to-air guided weapon and the unmanned air-craft There is also the ballistic rocket, which first appeared as the V.2, and, though this vehicle does not fly in the usually accepted sense, itdiffers from the older forms of projectile in that it carries its own pro- pulsion system and uses a guidance system. All these air vehiclestherefore come within the charter for which our Society was established and the sciences, techniques and engineering practices employed are"Spheres of knowledge which distinguishes the 'Profession of Aero- nautics.' " The "General Advancement of Aeronautical Art, Scienceand Engineering" which the Society is charged to foster is thus an ever- growing responsibility which we must prepare to undertake by wideningthe scope of membership and, as mentioned by our past President, Mr. Rowe, in his address last year, by the formation of Sections to giveproper impetus to the new branches of aeronautics. For example, your Council is currently working out the special cover-age which the Society should provide in scientific, technical and opera- tional fields unique to these uninhabited air vehicles. It is clear thatsome of the techniques and engineering practices employed in the development of unmanned vehicles of flight are not required in themanned vehicle. But to share the job that man and his aircraft have hitherto done so well will call for knowledge and skills in these unin-habited vehicles which have not been acquired in other pursuits. Equip- ment with a high order of sensitivity to many different forms of signals,coupled with a reliability seldom surpassed in any works of man, will be needed to match the very high speeds of some of these vehicles. These new vehicles of the air, essential as they may be considered from the military point of view, are competing for a large part of thelimited aeronautical effort and facilities available and, while in the main they are expendable, they may prove useful stepping-stones to otherforms of air vehicle and in any event they will certainly help in the future development of high-speed manned flight. In other words, justas the existence of the aircraft urged the development of nuclear weapons so will these unmanned air vehicles provide data to accelerate furtherdevelopment of the aircraft ... . ,. , In our quest for speed the hazard of poor visibility has taken secondplace and landing speeds have consequently increased in sympathy with cruising speeds. As we have already seen, long range, high speed andhigh loading taken collectively are conducive in civil operations to high revenue; thus the operator finds it more attractive to demand highcruising-speed than to demand low landing-speed. But a halt to this practice must be called and once again it would appear that the onus forgiving this command is on the aeronautical engineer, that is on the engine designer, the airframe designer, the electronics designer, the instrumentdesigner, and so on, by demonstrating that landing speed and cruising speed need no longer remain dependent design parameters . . . A word about security would not perhaps be out of place. Actuallythis subject cannot be out of place, for is it not true to say that it is the combined efforts of the aeronautical engineer and the physicist, sup-ported by scientists in all fields of science, that have placed aeronautics right in the forefront, not only of offence in war, but also of defence?In consequence we members of the Royal Aeronautical Society cannot be free to write as we will about our achievements. But I have heardsome of our members say that security regulations preclude them from writing a paper which is of sufficient interest to their colleagues.Although no one will wish to deny that security and free speech are not compatible, in the field of aeronautics, where progress is so rapid, aero-nautical information—which to the few is history—is to the majority knowledge and it therefore follows that as soon as anyone of us is per-mitted to talk of his work this, no matter what the subject, must be news to the majority. Our Society, in virtue of its very title and the fact that ourdaily labours lead to end-products, is in itself a very good reason why our members cannot expect to be as free as their contemporaries in sisterinstitutions, who are not so close to the military and do not necessarily deal with any specific end-product. To leave this subject of lectures submerged in a miasma of securitywithout referring to the Society's lecture record of 1956 would be a gross injustice to members, and particularly to the lecturers. Last year 47lecture sessions were held in London, including two all-day sessions, and a two-day conference arranged jointly by the Society and theInstitute of Physics was held at the College of Aeronautics. The num- ber of lectures read before branches was 162, excluding 53 other meet-ings, all with an aeronautical context. By any standards this is an excellent achievement and great credit is due to those who gave up somuch of their own time to the general education of others. If we add to these figures the lectures arranged by the Divisions and Branches ofother Commonwealth countries the growing status of our Society and the influence it now has in matters aeronautical can well be gauged.Three additional branches of the Society were formed in Britain in 1956, making a total now of 27, and all are established in areas wherethere is a large aeronautical population. The value to the aeronautical industry of the work of these branches, and of the efforts made by theirlocal officers, are both factors which we should constantly have in mind and this leads me to refer to the recent expansion of the industry . . .Britain's aeronautical exports in 1956 reached a record high level and, what is even more important, they were a sizeable part of the country'stotal exports. This news must have been welcomed by the nation as a whole but it was particularly good news to members of the Society,because our members are the industries' and the users' employees or their potential employees. The Society's news is good too. More than twicethe number of new members were enrolled by the Society last year than in any previous year and it is most gratifying to note that a large per-centage of these are in the Student and Graduate grades. I understand, too, that the College of Aeronautics enrolled more students in 1956 thanever before All in all, therefore, and bearing in mind the speed record which we obtained early last year, we must conclude that 1956 was botha good year for industry and for the Royal Aeronautical Society We must not, however, even for a moment, be complacent in times when somuch around us is accelerating. There is no virtue or value in being a member of the oldest Society ofour kind unless we keep it young, active and virile by recognizing that progress in aeronautics today is infinitely quicker than at any timesince 1866 when the Society was formed; that the main stem of aero- nautics now has many branches and more are growing; and that thebeckon en8ln=ermg of aeronautics will continue to excite and to The Assembly Hall of Church House, Westminster, was the scene of the presidential address.
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